SEO (search engine optimization) is big news all over the internet. You can download e-books that promise to give you the inside story, or hire an expensive guru who has “the secret to SEO” all figured out. But the real secret is something the gurus don’t want you to know.
Why SEO matters
When you put a web page up on the internet, it dosen’t accomplish anything unless people can find it. If you want visitors to come and see your creation, you have to let them know about it.
Google is the first place many people go when they’re looking for something online. (Other search engines are important, too, but they work much like Google.) If the search engine can find you when people type in, say “Landscaping in Eugene, Oregon” your web site will be much more effective.
So search engine optimization, or SEO, is about increasing your visibility to search sites like Google. If search results for a particular phrase find your page among the first few listed, you’re likely to get more traffic (visitors) to your site.
The “Secret” to SEO
The real secret to SEO is that there’s no mystery, no trick. Despite stories you may hear to the contrary, it’s not about tricks and games. it’s about creating the kind of web site that people want to use.
To me, discovering this was a big relief. Tricks strike me as a little deceptive, and scary. The idea that I could get results without resorting to those tactics… whew!
Get Rich Quick Using Google!
There was a time when people were able to cheat Google and other search engines to place higher in the search results. They’d do it by putting a whole bunch of “keywords” on a page–more than any human reader would need to see. Sometimes, they’d make the keywords invisible to human users, but the “bots” (or “spiders”–computers that scan the web for sites like Google) could see them, and would be fooled.
Some people made a lot of money online this way, for a while. But before long, Google and the other search engines were on to them. The tricks stopped working. More tricks were crafted, but this time, Google caught on even quicker.
It got harder and harder to game the system. In fact, some sites were banned entirely from Google for trying.
In the end, these methods simply can’t win, and here’s why.
The good guys win
Google wants to do one thing well. They want to give people the results they’re looking for when they do a search. They want searchers to be really happy about what Google hands them. If searchers get results that aren’t satisfying, they won’t continue to use and trust Google.
And the thing is… Google is really good at getting what it wants.
So what they do is to continually get better at evaluating whether a web site is what a visitor wants to see. Yes, they do use rules, but the rules become more complex, and, luckily for us, more realistic.
This means that instead of worrying about whether exactly 7.3% of the words one your website are the keyword you think people will search for, instead of buying inbound links from unscrupulous “link farms”, you can worry about creating the web site your customers want to see, and count on Google to do a pretty good job of noticing it.
If your site provides good information, presented well, and it’s the kind of site searchers are looking for, Google wants to find it.
More resources on SEO
Learn more about being search-engine friendly
Google’s support pages have this great article on Search Engine Optimization. You can also find out more on Wikipedia’s page on SEO.
Coming soon: Specific strategies for real SEO.
Come back here next week for some specifics about:
- search-engine-friendly design
- keeping the bots happy
- how a site-map can help
- writing for the web
